I’m behind in noting the latest from UK jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, who now declares, in essence, that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. It’s a challenge to decipher Atzmon’s miserable writing, but here it is:
Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place. Would the Zionists understand the real meaning of their Holocaust, the contemporary Israelite may be able to prevent the destruction that may be awaiting them in the future.
Similarly, Wagner may be banned in Israel, yet, the conditions that led Marx, Weininger and Wagner to say what they had to say remain unchanged. […]
Weininger? David T at Harry’s Place points to a refresher on this antisemitic and racist philosopher (1880-1903), who said among other things:
A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence.
Judeosphere notes that at least one administrator at UK Indymedia has leapt to Atzmon’s defense by starting a new blog, “Saying NO to the hunters of Atzmon,” which could be rephrased as “Saying NO to the principled opponents of racism and antisemitism.” Sad to see Indymedia continue on its sinister, phony-progressive path. I wonder when jazz musicians and critics will get a clue.
[Update: Of course there’s more. Atzmon writes elsewhere:
For an Israeli to humanise himself, he must de-zionise himself. In this way, self-hating can become a very productive power. It’s the same sense of self-hating I find, too, in Jews who have given the most to humanity, like Christ, Spinoza or Marx. They bravely confronted their beast and, in doing so, they made sense to many millions.
It’s interesting to compare Atzmon with the French comic-turned-hatemonger Dieudonné, who is profiled in this week’s New Yorker by Tom Reiss (just in time for my trip to Paris). A black man who has made common cause with Le Pen and the National Front, Dieudonné strikes me as a few degrees more intelligent and subtle than Atzmon, actually.
Bernard Henri-Lévy has an interesting quote in the Reiss profile:
In France, being an anti-Semite in the old way does not work … You will not raise a mass movement by saying the Jews killed Christ — nobody cares. Accuse them of having invented Christ, like Voltaire did in the eighteenth century, still nobody cares. As far as being a special race, nobody believes that anymore. But anti-racist anti-Semitism — saying that for the sake of the blacks, for the sake of the Arabs, we must make the Jews shut up — this works.
Atzmon does the antiracist bit and the anachronistic bit, and oddly, this seems to work as well — some on the left still come to his defense. Maybe a British thing. We can be thankful that as a jazz musician, Atzmon is doomed to a certain obscurity, very much unlike Dieudonné.]
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